I first saw Emscripten a few years ago. It compiled C++ to
Javascript. My mind boggled! How cool! This year at
Game Developers Conference there was a talk showing that Emscripten
plus asm.js
could run C++ games in the browser with good performance. I was
amazed.

After publishing my article on hex grids, I decided I should do
something different for a little while. I remembered Emscripten looked
intriguing, and I should try it out. Could I make BlobCity, an OS/2-only game from 15 years ago, run in the browser?

SimBlob. This is the project that got me interested in tile games, hex maps,
pathfinding, road drawing, economic simulation, AI, and procedural map
generation. Those of you who have been following me for a long time
know that these are topics I'm especially fond of. This project was a
huge influence on me and my game programming site. It ended 15 summers ago.

SimBlob was the simulation game engine / project that I was going to
use for a building game called BlobCity, but I also wanted to use it for other games. As typical for people who work on a game engine
first, I didn't finish. But that's ok. I was writing the game in order
to learn and experiment, not learning and experimenting in order to write
a game.